Industries such as television broadcast, movie and others currently employing stereoscopic based 3-D technologies are facing several quality assurance and quality control issues. In video, processing artifacts and impairments are distracting, more to some users than others. Additionally, although currently rising in popularity, three-dimensional video may cause visual discomfort for some viewers, where the discomfort is typically related to an amount of horizontal disparity between stereoscopic (left and right) images of the 3-D image.
Currently techniques are available that provide indications, predictions, alarms and causes of visual discomfort and impairments for video in production settings for two-dimensional video. Some of these techniques, albeit in a difficult fashion, have been used to measure various combinations of measuring right and left images of 3-D image. For example, techniques have been developed to measure the right and left 2-D images that make up a 3-D image, separately, then average the right and left quality results. As another example, the TEKTRONIX PQA600 can be used for 3D video quality assessment by measuring processed left (test) video against unprocessed left (reference) video for a video quality assessment of the left view, and likewise for the right view.
At an increasing rate, however, 3-D video is being generated from existing 2-D video. Additionally, other 3-D processing is occurring, such as 3-D movies made for cinema being repurposed as a blue-Ray DVD, etc., for R&D of video equipment (capture, processing such as codecs, etc.), and other applications. Currently there are no full reference systems for directly predicting subjective quality of stereoscopic video.
Embodiments of the invention address these and other limitations of the prior art.